Things I Shouldn’t Have to Mansplain
You know that scene where the hackers are about to breach the firewall, and the sys admin (the girl with the glasses, tussled hair, and freckles on her nose) has to stop them before they get to the server? You’ve seen it. It’s in every TV show with a sys admin with glasses, tussled hair, and freckles on her nose.
What you don’t see is what’s happening off screen. That’s me, shouting at the TV. “Just unplug it!”
In my fantasies, the sys admin turns wide eyed to the camera and says, “Huh?”
Then I mansplain, “Look behind the server. There will be a cable connecting it to the network. Unplug that cable. Problem solved.”
This fantasy used to end with the sys admin and me engaged in some sort of carnality. But now that I’m older it’s just a firm handshake, a cordial thanks, and a secret ceremony where the president gives me a shiny medal.
The scene with the sys admin isn’t much different from conversations with my mother, who is baffled by technological advances like telephones and microwave ovens.
When her landline phone stopped working my brother sent her a new one, but she couldn’t use it until a friend came over to “set it up.”
“It’s a phone,” I told her the next time I called. “You just plug it in.”
“I know,” she said. “But I was afraid I’d mess it up.”
I was about to start mansplaining when she said “hold on” and put the phone down. For the next sixty seconds all I heard was what sounded like a pterodactyl straining to lay a particularly difficult egg. When she came back she just said, “I have to go. My microwave isn’t working.”
An hour later she messaged me on Facebook. “The firemen just left. I burned a potato.”
Firemen? How did we go from “My microwave isn’t working” to firemen putting out a potato? What was she cooking it in, a bonfire?
Then it hit me. The microwave. Of course. It could happen to anyone. She must have built the bonfire inside the microwave. No wonder it wasn’t working.
My mother often surprises me with the things she doesn’t know. I’m not talking about particle physics or calculus or why the government can’t balance a budget. I’m talking about things you would think, in eighty-six years of living, she would have picked up. Like telephones and microwaves and those inscrutable Mexican sandwiches we call quesadillas.
Last time we visited, my wife made us quesadillas for dinner. My mother demanded to know where we got the “quesadilla bread.” Apparently her store didn’t carry it.
My wife, ever the soul of tact, said, “YOU MEAN TORTILLAS?”
Later I told her the polite thing would have been to say, “Yeah, it’s really hard to find. This time I just used tortillas.”
“Don’t lie to your mother,” she snapped back. “Besides, at least now she can make herself quesadillas any time she wants.”
I suppose she’s right. Maybe next time we visit, mom can make the quesadillas. And maybe after dinner we’ll show her where to find those elusive, fire retardant potatoes.